jonathan donnerhttp://jonathandonner.com
r.e.: digital inclusionMon, 23 Mar 2015 08:12:25 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Experiencing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as a Participatory Medium: The Case of CGNet Swara in Indiahttp://jonathandonner.com/archives/893
http://jonathandonner.com/archives/893#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 14:39:42 +0000http://jonathandonner.com/?p=893Continue reading Experiencing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as a Participatory Medium: The Case of CGNet Swara in India]]>I’m happy to report that Preeti Mudliar and I have a new paper in Mobile Media and Communication about the CGNet Swara platform for citizen journalism in India. The archival version is available here, behind the Sage paywall. A ‘pre-publication’ version is hosted right here.

With the widespread use of mobile phones in the developing world, interactive voice response (IVR) systems are increasingly accessible to people with low literacy and/or limited financial resources. Interest in using IVR systems as a means to increase citizen participation in society has increased. Yet, research exploring the potential of IVRs—with particular affordances, constraints, and norms—to facilitate citizen participation in society remains limited. Drawing on field data gathered as part of a study of CGNet Swara, an IVR-based citizen journalism platform in rural India, we introduce the concept of a “participatory IVR” and undertake a phenomenological inquiry to account for user interactions with the system.

This is the second paper we have written on CGNET Swara. The first (with Bill Thies) is here.

]]>http://jonathandonner.com/archives/893/feed0New Issue of ITID: selected papers from ICTD2013http://jonathandonner.com/archives/886
http://jonathandonner.com/archives/886#commentsMon, 16 Mar 2015 20:57:10 +0000http://jonathandonner.com/?p=886Continue reading New Issue of ITID: selected papers from ICTD2013]]>Tapan Parikh (@tap2k) and I co-edited a special issue of the journal Information Technologies and International Development (ITID), entitled Diverse Methods, Complementary Perspectives: Selected Papers from ICTD2013. It was great–and a challenge–to have so many excellent papers to draw on from the conference in Cape Town. Take a look. It’s open access.

From our intro:

Taking these articles together, we gain a fuller picture of the roles and impacts of information access on ongoing development processes, including not only the design and use of specific technological solutions, but also their relationships to specific user, social, and policy contexts. As digital access grows in developing countries, we can imagine that these findings will be relevant to a broad range of both public and private actors seeking to better understand the design, uses, and impacts of ICTs in developing countries.

We miss you, Gary!

]]>http://jonathandonner.com/archives/886/feed0Challenges of representing informal microenterprise on the Internethttp://jonathandonner.com/archives/823
http://jonathandonner.com/archives/823#commentsTue, 14 Oct 2014 13:54:43 +0000http://jonathandonner.com/?p=823Continue reading Challenges of representing informal microenterprise on the Internet]]>My paper with Kuza.com co-founder Andrew Maunder, Beyond the phone number: Challenges of representing informal microenterprise on the Internet, appears in the new volume, Living Inside Mobile Social Information, edited by James Katz. Thanks to Prof. Katz and to the College of Communication at Boston University for including us in the great workshop, and in the resulting open-access publication. (full book download here)

“Throughout the developing world, details about even the tiniest businesses are beginning to be captured, processed, stored, and disseminated by the servers and services comprising the global Internet. How (and how successfully) will services on the Internet represent these businesses, when the lines between a small enterprise—an institution or service—and the entrepreneur—a person—supporting it are so blurred?”

My thoughts and sympathies are with Gary Marsden’s family, friends, and colleagues. It was such a shock to hear he had passed away. An amazing, inspirational person has left us much too soon.

I barely knew Gary before I moved to South Africa in 2009, but Gary welcomed me to UCT’s “ICT4D” community as a colleague and we became great friends. Gary, Gil, and their children were wonderful hosts for my family, and we will treasure the long afternoons full of conversation, food, and play our two families spent together.

As a colleague, he was unparalleled, and I miss him already. I learned a great deal by collaborating on writing projects with him, and by working together closely on the ICTD2012 and ICTD2013 conferences. Up close, I came to appreciate how Gary was passionate, progressive, and yet also pragmatic in his work in the field. You could count on Gary and his students to help the communities they worked with “build stuff” that really worked. In our field of ICTD, that’s no easy task, but Gary had a particularly nuanced and powerful balance of optimism and humility, of patience and sensitivity that allowed him to harness the complexities of intermingling technologies and community development.

The abundance and intensity of Gary’s compassion, insight, empathy, and kind spirit remains reflected in the network of remarkable colleagues and scholars Gary helped nurture in South Africa and beyond. Since coming to Cape Town I have been so fortunate to work with many of Gary’s former and current graduate students. I will continue learn from each of them as I learned from Gary, and in so doing will have some way to stay close to his energy, and to continue be inspired and guided by his perspectives.

]]>http://jonathandonner.com/archives/809/feed0A talk at the University of Jyväskylä: Everybody’s Internet – Mobile data in the developing worldhttp://jonathandonner.com/archives/755
http://jonathandonner.com/archives/755#commentsSat, 27 Jul 2013 16:35:40 +0000http://jonathandonner.com/?p=755Continue reading A talk at the University of Jyväskylä: Everybody’s Internet – Mobile data in the developing world]]>Here is the video from my talk at a recent conference on mobile telephony in the developing world organised by Laura Stark and colleagues at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) 23-25 May 2013. This was a fascinating conference and I am grateful to the organizers for hosting me, and for putting the three keynotes online.

The talk details some of the ideas I am working on about how ICT4D/M4D and New Media Studies might best approach/understand mobile internet use in the developing world. One key, I think, is to evaluate mobile use as part of people’s shifting digital repertoires, rather than trying to theorize mobile (or mobile internet) use in isolation. On his blog John Postill posted a great rundown of and reflections on the main points in my talk. Hop over there for further conversation.

In a separate post, he also details his talk from the same event – Mobile Phones and Actual Changes in the Global South. His remarks cautioned us against the pressure to describe and document sociotechnical change currently underway, and invited instead reflection on the near past, on change already observable, as a good place for generative theory. It was a great experience to integrate and discuss the comments from John Postill and the third keynote from Julie Soleil Archambault. We had a nice dialogue across the keynotes, mixing between instrumental “4d” frames and broader discussions of appropriation, and shifted focus from near past to current complexities to some near-future projections (mobile data is coming….). Across the three keynotes, and in combination with all the fascinating papers presented in panel sessions, I think the conference captured the state-of-the discussion on mobiles in the Global South.

By the way, early summertime in Jyvaskyla is beautiful, and the days are quite long. This was taken after dinner, I think….

]]>http://jonathandonner.com/archives/755/feed0more letters, more problems: ICT4D as a compound termhttp://jonathandonner.com/archives/242
http://jonathandonner.com/archives/242#commentsFri, 04 Nov 2011 14:47:11 +0000http://jonathandonner.com/?p=242Continue reading more letters, more problems: ICT4D as a compound term]]>Here are five great posts that I have been thinking about over the last few days. I’ve tried to tweet a thought or two but am finding that difficult to do in this case. Too much subtlety for 140 characters, so I must blog. Drat.

I’m not going to try to summarize each of the posts. Each is worth a read, and as a set they are even better. At some point in the midst of this discussion (which also included @jeffswin@meowtree and and @katypearce), I added two tweets

Let me expand on these assertions in something a bit closer to compete sentences.

i. As terms, #ict4d & #m4d can be problematic. See blog posts 1-5 for evidence to this effect. @nwin’s newest post with the reference to Kleine and Unwin (2009) is particularly nice here.

ii. Healthy critiques abound. That was a short way of saying that I think the discussion and criticism are important, and ultimately beneficial to the community of researchers and practitioners involved. There are problems with the 4 and with the D. Even if we march on ahead under the banner of say #ict4d or #ictd, we should know the limits and complications of the terms we use, and remain cognizant of how those terms influence or conversations with each other and with the broader worlds of development and technology (and whomever else you might talk to about ICTD

iii. T>techno-focus, 4>paternalism D>growth. Here I link each letter to a common critique of it. But to reply to @nwin, the > is not an = and I don’t mean to imply that links are iron-clad. But they are common. It is possible to be “4” development without being paternalistic, but it is also easy, if one is not thinking carefully, to use formulations of development which can slip towards paternalism. Same for confusing “D” with growth and consumption. There was a long conversation in plenary at the ICTD2010 conference about what the field “means” by “development”. We have not agreed on a common term yet – perhaps we never will.

iv. Perhaps #ictd is better & broader? Simply ICT in/and D. Personally, I like ICTD better than ICT4D, since it allows for alternate and more expansive inquiries into non-instrumental or even counter-instrumental users of technologies in “developing” contexts. (See for example, this great book by Jack Qiu – #ictd but maybe not #ict4d). Unfortunately #ict4d and #m4d get the traffic on Twitter so that’s where I go to learn from and interact with all of you.

v. With acronyms: more letters=more problems. On its own, each letter is problematic and the problems interact when the the letters are strung together. But not everyone agrees about which letters are more problematic. I have seen heated debates about “IT” vs. “ICT” let alone the R and the D. This gets worse with fragmentation #m4d #ict4rd #hci4d #ict4sd, etc. Above, @Stevesong did a bit of a rant about the M but seemed OK with the D. @Whiteafrican took strong issue with the D but seemed OK with the ICT4. Later @nwin made a strong case for keeping the “4”, since is a (welcome) challenge to think about inclusivity, intervention, and power relations in his work.

In summary, I don’t think we’re going to move off ICT4D as the default compound term, at least for a while. But I like these discussions and think it is important for the community to have them from time to time…probably quite frequently since the field/community of practice is increasingly methodologically diverse, and growing. The conversations are not easy as some might like them to be, but that is because they are about a “compound” community. Regular bouts of reflection are not just navel gazing – they should help us remain reflective, careful, and precise in the use of the terms we use to describe what we do and why we do it.

I gave a brief talk “is this not a phone? on smarter phones and global development” as part of the 2011 WTF conference at CPUT. Contact me directly if you want the slides — they aren’t great without the accompanying spoken commentary, but perhaps useful to some.

Using an ethnographic action research approach, the study explores the challenges, practices, and emergent framings of mobile-only Internet use in a resource-constrained setting. We trained eight women in a nongovernmental organization’s collective in South Africa, none of whom had used a personal computer, how to access the Internet on mobile handsets they already owned. Six months after training, most continued to use the mobile Internet for a combination of utility, entertainment, and connection, but they had encountered barriers, including affordability and difficulty of use. Participants’ assessments mingled aspirational and actual utility of the channel with and against a background of socioeconomic constraints. Discussion links the digital literacy perspective to the broader theoretical frameworks of domestication, adaptive structuration, and appropriation.

]]>http://jonathandonner.com/archives/471/feed0On the importance and availability of prepay mobile data in Africa. Slides, paper, discussionhttp://jonathandonner.com/archives/178
http://jonathandonner.com/archives/178#commentsThu, 11 Nov 2010 06:45:58 +0000http://jonathandonner.com/?p=178Continue reading On the importance and availability of prepay mobile data in Africa. Slides, paper, discussion]]>I am at the fascinating M4D2010 conference in Kampala. As part of an afternoon session on Access & Inclusion, I will present the following short paper:

Additional discussion of our project, particularly the crowdsourcing component, is available on Kevin’s blog.

Abstract

We argue that clear and easy access to prepay data will be as essential to the widespread adoption and use of the mobile internet in developing countries as access to prepay airtime was to the adoption of the mobile telephone. In late 2009, we conducted a desk assessment of the availability of pre-pay (pay-as-you-go) data from major operators in 53 African countries. We identified at least one operator in 38 countries which offered pre-pay data, and in 3 cases we could determine that no prepay data was available. Information available from many operators was vague, incomplete, and hard to obtain, suggesting that a threshold of mainstream promotion of the service by operators may not yet have been crossed. We suggest topics for further research, both on the demand and supply sides of the prepaid data equation.

]]>http://jonathandonner.com/archives/178/feed0Is constraint a noun or an adjective in ICT4D? A talk at SAICSIT 2010http://jonathandonner.com/archives/171
http://jonathandonner.com/archives/171#commentsThu, 04 Nov 2010 05:58:35 +0000http://jonathandonner.com/?p=171Continue reading Is constraint a noun or an adjective in ICT4D? A talk at SAICSIT 2010]]>Recently, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT2010). Congratulations and thanks to the hosts, the Meraka Institute of South Africa’s CSIR. It was a great chance for me to meet more of the CS and IS research communities in South Africa, and particularly to meet lots of researchers working on ICT4D related projects.

I ventured some new ideas about the role of constraint as a unifying concept within the interdisciplinary research community of ICT4D.

Many of the slides were photo-heavy and text-light, so they don’t stand alone very well. But you can follow the links above for background on parts 1 and 2.

As for the new ideas, I’ll share a few core elements below. Comments and queries are quite welcome here – these ideas need discussion before they can be considered really stable. Indeed they are already changing a bit from the original comments at SAICSIT, so don’t treat this like a transcript.

Nouns and Adjectives: Remarks on Constraint and ICT4D

Why ICT4D? Why carve out ICT4D, when we can apply traditional approaches like Computer Science, Informatics, HCI, Psychology and Economics?

The answer, I think, is that in theory and in practice, ICT4D is inherently interdisciplinary, and usually requires collaboration or synthesis in order to be successful. I mentioned Mike Trucano’s list of “10 Worst Practices in ICT for Education” presented at Failfare (DC) as a great illustration/discussion of how many different factors can trip up would-be ICT4D interventions. I also returned to the discussion of mobile internet training we did in Khayelitsha. The successes and failures of that training could be understood from a variety of lenses, from political economies of the South African labor market, to mobile HCI, to gender and family structures, to pricing and telecommunications service provisions. No single discipline has a sufficiently broad analytic frame to account for the complexities of most ICT4D interventions or processes.

After establishing this interdisciplinary tension, I suggested that in ICT4D, constraint (economic, social, human, environmental, technical) is an implicit but critical concept, inviting contributions from multiple research perspectives. This observation was not intended as a an examination of the definitions/boundaries of “I”, “C”, “T”, “4”, or especially “D”. Instead, it simply identified a concept intentionally broad enough to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange within ICT4D. Various forms of “constraint” can be evoked as:

Designing for constraints (economic, infrastructural, skills)

Predicting behavior under constraints (pricing, policy)

Reducing constraints (agency, freedom, power)

The thing that is both exciting and challenging is that the various disciplines in ICT4D are unlikely to share a single specific definition of constraint. The differences may boil down to what is being constrained – the human (user) or the technology.

For many social scientists, constraints are limits on a human being’s possible actions. These constraints range from individual-level psychological factors (skills, emotions, knowledge) to micro-social local conditions, (peer groups, families), to macro-level social constructs (cultures, institutions, economies, networks). As such, constraints both reflect and reproduce complexity, and are unavoidable products of the embeddedness of humans, technologies, and social systems; multiple constraints are always present…and will always be present. To social scientists, constraints are big, permanent fixtures in human societies – constraints are nouns, if you will, with properties of their own.

Meanwhile for many computer scientists and engineers, constraints represent the conditions under which a proposed technical solution must function. A proposed solution X must work under constraints A, B, and C or it is not a “solution”. In this way, constraints present boundaries to technical challenges, but also make them harder. (e.g., it is one thing to create an m-banking application – it is another thing to make with work for cheap handsets, low-literacy, and unreliable security protocols). Consider this slide, which reproduces some of the topics from the call for papers for the upcoming SIG-DEV event in London. The bold terms [formatting is my addition] suggest a focus on technical constraints, where a number of constraints are offered as adjectives “low-cost”, “intermittent”, “low-literacy”, “disabled”, modifying other perhaps more familiar and less problematic nouns like “networks”, “connectivity” or “languages”.

Despite these differences, “constraint” seems to me to be a term that, at least most people within ICT4D, regardless of their research background, can discuss, explore, engage, and confront. If there’s one thing that everyone in ICT4D can agree on, its that we’re working in a landscape full of conditions which can be described as constraints. This baseline commonality is not necessarily the case with some other concepts in ICT4D, from justice to productivity to agency to freedom. I haven’t actually sat down and tried to build an interdisciplinary case for the other such terms, but my hunch is that they each present more difficulties if the goal is cross-disciplinary collaboration and synthesis.

A focus on constraint as a facilitative concept brings a few things into focus for ICT4D:

1. The arrival of computer science and engineers in the conversation seems to have roughly coincided with the introduction of ICT4D as a term around 2001-2002. Before that, terms like “the digital divide’ or “the new world information order” or “Mass communications and international development” were more central. These earlier incarnations of the interdisciplinary field we now know as ICT4D were concerned with social and economic change, in using the power of information and communications media to create a more fair, more prosperous, more healthy, more heterogeneous society in a world filled with constraints on human action). However from the 1950s to the 1990s, it was the exception, rather than the norm, to have the active involvement of computer scientists and engineers who could actually build (or adapt) specific technologies to work under conditions of both technical and social/structural constraint.

2. It is difficult for a single practitioner or researcher to use constraint as an adjective and a noun at simultaneously. To move between technical and social-structural lenses, between software stacks and sustainable business models, between interface design and alternative cognitive structures, or between creating user affordances and navigating political economies is challenging; to bring them all to bear on a single ICT4D project is harder still.

3. Each approach to constraint has a logical distillation (extreme) which can undermine an ICT4D project or analysis. When constraints are approached as nouns, used to describe barriers to human action, there is a risk of analytic and practical paralysis, in which every critique offers another critique, offers a multiplicity of overlapping and semi-permanent constraints, or brings another layer of complexity to the challenges of making things better for (or with) someone else. Conversely, when constraint s are introduced as adjectives, modifying and limiting the applicability of a technical solution, the distillation (in isolation) may be a narrow focus on satisfying a problem defined by a small set of contextual factors constraints, and an unchallenged expectation that most problems can be solved via technologies, given the right resources and time horizon.

There are at least two ways to confront this breadth of concepts and constraints.

Richard Heeks proposes one approach in his article on ICT4D 2.0, suggesting that ICT4D needs “to develop or find ICT4D champions who are tribrids: They must understand enough about the three domains of computer science, IS, and development studies to draw key lessons and interact with and manage domain professionals.”(p 31). These renaissance researchers (my word, not Heeks’) are rare but not impossible to develop. Anyone with a combination of technical knowledge, the willingness to dive deeply into social scene and development theory, and the willingness to spend time in the field, with would-be users of various ICTs, might be able to become a renaissance researcher.

Alas, I’ll probably never be a tribrid or a renaissance researcher. I come from a social science background. Even though I now work at MSR in the midst of some of the best technical innovators in the domain, I can’t code my way out of a paper bag.

Which brings me to the other way we can address the interdisciplinarity of ICT4D, which is through productive collaboration. (Heeks mentions this approach as multidisciplinary teambuilding). It is not by chance that some of the best work in ICT4D comes out of labs or institutes where computer scientists, engineers, social scientists, and designers are encouraged to overlap. In South Africa, these places include the Meraka Institute (the host of SAICSIT2010), the UCT Centre in ICT4D, (where I get to hang out) and the Siyakhula Living Lab. Elsewhere, examples include my very own Technology for Emerging Markets Group at MSR India. Recently I’ve been working on a project alongside a designer and three HCI specialists, and they bring such different lenses and insights to bear on our topic. I could not be learning what I’m learning without them (details coming soon…)

In either case, via renaissance researchers or via collaborations, these vehicles for interdisciplinary exchange and synthesis are a key to good ICT4D work. Indeed, the renaissance and the collaboration mechanisms are best ways to embrace and be informed by these different forms of constraint. Conversation and collaboration can draw each view of constraint back away from its distillations, towards a nuanced but actionable middle ground where remarkable work can be done.